BALTIMORE—Monitoring PERS and mPERS is different from monitoring traditional alarms, ESX 2015 panelists said in the “To PERS or Not to PERS” educational session, and those who can’t handle all that monitoring PERS entails in-house might be better leaving that the market to central stations that can.

Tunstall Americas on June 9 announced its acquisition of Kupuna Monitoring Systems, a PERS dealer based in Aiea, Hawaii. While the number of accounts and the price of the deal were not released, Allison Frazer, Tunstall Americas’ director of marketing, told me it was part of an ongoing company strategy.

Tunstall focuses on supplying and monitoring PERS devices for seniors. As such, Frazer said the company is actively looking to have a larger presence in warmer climates, which tend to have higher concentrations of seniors, Frazer said. “Hawaii alone has over 40,000 seniors who we believe can benefit from our services," she said.

These accounts will be monitored from Tunstall’s 87,000 square-foot “Connected Care Center” in Pawtucket, R.I. Kupuna’s accounts were previously monitored by Philips.

Frazer said that Kupuna would start offering Tunstall systems, which it hadn’t done previously, and will transition all existing Kupuna customers to Tunstall equipment.

"We are proud of the work we have done the past 10 years to support the elder community throughout Hawaii, and very grateful for the trust people have put in KMS,” Cullen Hayashida, president and founder of KMS, said in a prepared statement.

“We believe that our local service delivery and strong relationships with healthcare institutions and government agencies combined with Tunstall's world-class connected care monitoring products and services will create new opportunities to serve Hawaii’s kupuna and their families,” Hayashida continued, in the statement.

Last week, AvantGuard’s CEO, Josh Garner, told me a story. He had recently heard of a woman recovering from a fall, one who was set up with a traditional PERS unit. After hearing that it wouldn’t work outside of the home, she hadn’t left the house for 15 months, he said. After a dealer heard of this, he set her up with one of Securus’ mPERS devices.

“Eventually, she took a walk to the garden, then she walked down the street,” Garner told me. “She would test her device in all of these scenarios, and realized that if something were to happen to her… it still worked.”

“She celebrated by buying a puppy [which] she walks around her block every day.”

WELLINGBOROUGH, England—It’s a simple formula: A younger PERS user means a longer account life, and a longer account life means lower rates of attrition. Over the next five years, the North American PERS market is poised to grow on the strength of that proposition, rising from $700 million in 2014 to $1.5 billion by 2019, according to a recently published report from IHS.

HICKSVILLE, N.Y.—With several different mobile PERS models gaining traction in the monitoring space, it’s not yet clear what type of device and what combination of features will be the winner in the marketplace.

VIENNA, Va.—The Central Station Alarm Association has launched a pair of surveys, one dealing with the proposed “Alarm Monitoring Model Licensing Act,” and another with industry compensation practices, according to separate news releases from the CSAA.

HOBOKEN, N.J.—Yaniv Amir, president of Essence USA, believes PERS units need to become smarter, more intuitive and better able to transmit information passively. In short, they need to become less reliant on the human factor that comes with hitting a pendant. Devices best able to accomplish this, he says, will become differentiators for central stations.

YARMOUTH, Maine—Whether the talk is about mobile PERS devices with geo-fencing, speed alerts and lone-worker monitoring, or about smartphone apps that better connect subscribers with central stations, the takeaway is that the monitoring space is going mobile, and the transformation is happening fast, according to central station executives who are using these newer technologies.